The Brooklyn Public Library announced today that Mary Mattingly has been selected to serve as the library’s Katowitz Radin Artist-in-Residence for 2020. Established in 2014, the annual residency program invites emerging and established artists to engage with the library’s collections, programs, and services. Known for focusing on questions of ecology and climate change in her practice, Mattingly creates works that often serve as prototypes designed to solve specific societal problems such as displacement and sustainability.

Mattingly is the founder of Swale, an edible landscape cultivated on a five-thousand-foot barge that traverses Manhattan’s waterways and docks in ports where people can pick free fresh food. Funded through a Kickstarter campaign in 2016, Swale is an ongoing project that produces about four hundred pounds of food per season. Her other recent works include Pull, which she created for the Havana Biennial and What Happens After, which involved the dismantling of a military vehicle that was used in Afghanistan.

Her work will go on view alongside pieces by the transdisciplinary artist Dario Robleto in the exhibition “Stars Down to Earth,” which is curated by Cora Fisher and scheduled to open at Brooklyn Public Library’s central location at Grand Army Plaza on January 13, 2020. The show will be inaugurated by an artist talk with Robleto. Related programming will also be hosted by the Greenpoint Library and Environmental Education Center after the branch is completed early next year.